Confessions of a Recovering Nobody
[Music]
[Applause]
half breed
oreo brown on the outside but white on
the inside
knocked up hoe man face
full of yourself
these are just a few of the labels that
have been slapped onto me like a second
skin
an unwanted tattoo on my soul
and the real power behind these labels
is that i believed them
i started hearing them when i was about
eight
and they were reinforced throughout my
life
at school on the playground at church
and as i got
older in the workplace and when you hear
something about yourself so many times
you start to believe it
and all of those labels combined can
make you feel like a nobody
didn’t always feel like a nobody in fact
i believe that everyone’s default
setting at birth
is that we’re meant to be somebody we’re
bound for greatness
we’re special and unique and we’re
hungry all the time
but somewhere along the way the world
delights in telling us
that our stories our experiences and our
lives don’t matter
and so for a lot of my life i felt that
way
and it wasn’t one big event that made me
feel like a nobody
it actually started pretty innocuously
as otherness
so as a kid we’re given these forms to
fill out
and i remember seeing this for the first
time and it says fill one
circle well my mom is white
and my dad is filipino so i didn’t have
one circle that encompassed both of
those identities
except for that circle labeled other and
as a kid
feeling like an other an outcast it
makes for a really easy leap to feeling
like you’re not as good as the other
kids
and i had friends of all different
backgrounds and they all seem to belong
to relatively homogeneous and clearly
defined circles
but i never knew which one i could or
should claim
and this set a precedent for my entire
life and i knew
i was expected to fit in certain circles
and to check off certain boxes
and i inherently knew that those boxes i
checked
would determine my worth
as a young girl i checked off the victim
box
i was sexually abused by my father for
several years
according to the cdc one in three girls
and one in seven boys will be sexually
abused before their eighteenth birthdays
and more than ninety percent of them
know their abusers
but teenage stacy did not know that and
she did not realize how often this
happened
instead that girl felt completely alone
ashamed embarrassed what would people
think of me if they knew
and even worse than the trauma of the
years of abuse
was how it was handled by church leaders
when my mom went to them seeking advice
she had a really long list of my
father’s wrongdoings
and my abuse was one tiny item on that
list
and they counseled her to forgive him
to not talk about it and to move past it
and this told me that i did not matter
my story didn’t matter
at 16 i checked off another box i got
pregnant as a junior
i very quickly became the gossip of my
small high school good old goose creek
high home of the gators
and i was chronicled in black sharpie on
the bathroom stall door
as a knocked up hoe
i made the painful decision to place
that baby boy for adoption
i graduated a year early and i just
wanted to sweep that whole experience
under the rug the road to becoming a
nobody
continued to pave its way ahead of me
throughout my life
brick upon shame-filled brick and one
brick would tell me i was worthless
and another brick would tell me i’d
never do anything right and another
brick would tell me i wasn’t worthy of
love
and these thoughts manifested into
reality and self-sabotage
so that by the time i was 31 i was a
three-time divorced
three-time college dropout i had lost
custody of my daughter
i was bartending and waiting tables i
was barely making it
and i was raising a son who had just
gotten diagnosed with autism
each month i hoped my food stamps would
last long enough to get me to the next
month
shame does what shame does and it kept
me very quiet and small
it dictated the spaces i could be in it
allowed me to be objectified and
dehumanized in my workplaces by both my
co-workers and patrons and it told me
i deserved this at one of the
restaurants i worked at
i found out all the servers called me
man face behind my back
sorry men imagine
your face the very badge of who you are
being something offensive and something
you should be ashamed of
i felt like a complete nobody and one
night i had a breakdown i was lying on
my bathroom floor crying like who hasn’t
had one of those nights
and i just wanted those tiles to crack
open and swallow me up
the pain from the years of labels was
consuming me
and i needed to do something about it i
desperately
wanted to feel like a somebody but how
do you go
from feeling like a nobody to just
becoming a somebody
well it’s not an overnight process i can
tell you that much just like being a
nobody was
a years of events the long and winding
road of recovery to being a somebody
was also a series of events and even is
in this very moment
a work in progress i started saying and
doing things that felt like something
that somebody would do
so naturally i decided to run a marathon
because
somebody does that
the following year i went back to school
and i finally graduated summa [ __ ] laude
and on that day i felt like a somebody
i started getting involved in my
community volunteering with
organizations whose causes were
important to me
but even with these great things
happening in my life
that nagging voice would still pop up
and say stacy but if they really knew
they wouldn’t like you and so i kept my
stories
safe and sound and untold until about
three years
ago and i had an opportunity to do a
presentation for some work colleagues
and i decided i was going to share some
of my story i called it failure to
finisher
and i was terrified to publicly speak
about my past about my abuse and the
adoption because
these stories were the same stories that
had kept me bound in silent shame
for most of my life and now i was going
to put them out into the world
for people to know and judge in his
book the body keeps the score dr bessel
van der kolk wrote
it is one thing to process memories of
trauma
but it is an entirely different matter
to confront the inner void
the holes in the soul that result from
not having been wanted
not having been seen and not having been
allowed to speak the truth
i started rethinking all of the labels
that had defined me all my life and i
thought
maybe i could possibly redefine myself
i am a pr major so i’m pretty good at
spin
so it maybe instead of a man face
or oreo or half breed maybe i’m a bold
biracial beauty
maybe instead of thank you
maybe instead of a knocked up hoe maybe
i’m a badass birth mother
[Applause]
and maybe instead of being full of
myself maybe i’m strong and confident i
mean why not
in this positive regard these labels
became sources of pride rather than
stigmas of shame
and i believe that was the most
important part of the recovery process
which is why i’m here tonight are
recovering nobody
now what does that mean because i’ve had
some people that are like stacy that
sounds sad
yes that does sound sad but according to
a 2014 psychology today article
to be in recovery it means a person is
making progress
even though they aren’t cured we’re
never perfect we’re never cured but we
can always be making progress right
we can recover from sickness and surgery
we can recover from addiction we can
recover from broken hearts
we can recover from feeling like a
nobody recovery means i was once one way
but
now i’m another hope
the belief that these challenges and
conditions can be overcome
is the foundation of recovery and i
believe we could all use some hope
and i imagine that some of us in this
room have maybe felt like a recovering
nobody
after i hit my own rock bottom i learned
some secrets along the way
and i’m here to confess them with you
tonight so
confession number one this is not going
to be a big surprise
it feels really good to be seen to be
acknowledged to be valued
in her book braving the wilderness dr
brene brown call me bibi
she wrote true belonging is the
spiritual practice
of believing in and belonging to
yourself so deeply
that you can share your most authentic
self with the world and find sacredness
in both being a part of something
and standing alone in the wilderness
true belonging doesn’t require you to
change who you are
it requires you to be who you are and
this is not easy
and it is not without fear but when you
can look past your fear to the other
side you’ll see that everything you’ve
ever wanted
has been waiting for you confession
number two
feeling valued can feel like an
uncomfortable privilege
having felt voiceless for so much of my
life
it felt surreal to be in circles where i
was empowered to contribute
going from bartender to board member i
went from slinging jager bombs to gruppy
men
to getting zoom bombed by
anonymous keyboard warriors all because
the name of our online public meeting
had the word diversity in it
when you stand up for what you believe
in you become susceptible to getting
knocked
down discomfort is the cost of the
privilege
of finding and using your voice
confession number three not everyone’s
going to be happy about you becoming a
somebody
i was once told i was full of myself for
being excited about graduating college
at 36 mind you when we evolve into the
people we’re meant to be
we outgrow the circles that once defined
us and we defy certain people’s
expectations
sometimes we lose the love of those we
least expect
when it happened to me i was devastated
and it nearly derailed me as i felt
myself wanting to shrink back
into that safe space of being a nobody
and i might have
if it hadn’t been for the fire ignited
by confession number four
when you feel like a somebody your
perspective changes
and your perspective might not always be
welcome but that’s exactly why it’s
crucial i went from feeling like a
victim
to becoming a survivor a warrior
whether it’s as a mom to a special needs
child
or the only non-white member of a board
or the only female in a room
my perspective is crucial i still see
the world from my perch of otherness and
what i see
is kind of frustrating like why does my
atypical child
have to fit into a one-size-fits-all box
that isn’t really one size fits all
why are so many top and mid-level
leadership positions always
white and male-dominated and why and so
many pictures i’m a part of
does the song one of these things is not
like the other
always play in my head i don’t know all
the answers
but i do know if you want to see a
change
you have to be the change it’s why i
created an autism appreciation event in
my community
it’s why i joined my city’s diversity
commission
it’s why i speak on implicit bias and
it’s why i continue to show
up because children cannot be what they
cannot see
and i want kids to see a brown woman who
once felt completely invisible
become outspoken and take up space in
unexpected spaces
i want anyone who has ever felt like a
nobody to know
that they are somebody if you are like
me or recovering nobody
i challenge you to test your voice
know that your story matters become full
of yourself
and for those of you in the positions of
power and privilege you default
somebody’s
i challenge you to look at your own
circles are they pretty homogeneous
are there things that you can do to
change the culture and to challenge the
status quo
and i encourage all of us to listen to
the stories of current and recovering
nobodies
and empower them to be catalysts for
change
now they’re about to play the music like
they do at the academy awards to
encourage me to get off stage
but before they do that i’ve got one
last confession i have to share with
y’all tonight
standing in this red circle this is a
somebody
moment
but it has been a journey and i’ll
continue to be on this journey for as
long as i live but this one
started in 2017 the first year they held
tedx ogden
when i applied i interviewed and i was
rejected in 2018
i applied again did not get an interview
and was rejected again
in 2019 because like janie said i’m not
a quitter
i applied i interviewed and when i got
that third rejection i said stacy
maybe tedx isn’t for you in the meantime
in the meantime i went about my life i
just you know taking care of the family
doing my things speaking wherever i
could
i created a 501c3 nonprofit and i wrote
a book no big deal
so imagine my complete and utter joy
when i was invited to speak
at the 2020 tedx ogden
it had to happen to somebody so why not
me
hi my name is stacey brunell and i’m a
recovering nobody thank you
[Applause]
you